Lenz publishes books on contemporary art, photography, architecture and design.
Our imprint includes catalogues, monographs, theory and artist books.
The book is the first comprehensive monograph on the polymorphous work of Athanasios Argianas. It is published on the occasion of Hollowed Water, a major solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in 2020 and ARCH, Athens, in 2021.
Through exquisite craftsmanship, and with reference to romantic nationalism, Ann Böttcher explores how aesthetic and political projections characterize notions of nature, and how such conceptions are taken up by countries, political movements, and other institutions.
Voices (Towards Other Institutions) is the final act of the coral, multiform, articulated, two-year-long experiment carried out by Open, the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition.
The book deals with Diego Marcon’s practice through the analysis of three film and video works. Monelle (2017), Ludwig (2018), and The Parents’ Room (2020) are his most recent and complex projects, and they are all emblematic of central aspects of his production.
Over the last ten years, Raphael Hefti has created an astonishingly body of work consisting of sculptures and installations, performance and “art-in-public-spaces.” The first comprehensive monograph is published on the occasion of his major exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel.
Between 1998 and 1999, the London-based art collective BANK operated the Fax-Bak Service. The group’s members proof-read and copy-edited more than 300 press releases by galleries. The publication is the most comprehensive record of this notorious project.
Edited by Tolia Astakhishvili and Hans Ulrich Obrist
Texts: Tolia Astakhishvili, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English, softcover, 160 pages, 24 x 34 cm
ISBN 979-12-80579-65-2
The artist’s book to love and devour by Tolia Astakhishvili was published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at the new site of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation in Venice, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
The book, produced in close collaboration with the Lorenzo Mason Studio, brings together drawings, paintings, and archive images composed directly amid the cracks, wounds, and skin of a building located in the historic center of Venice, which served as the artist’s studio for a number of months. Through processes of transformation of the space, addition and subtraction, expansion and contraction, Astakhishvili has created a project shot through with a deep sense of disruption, distortion and fragmentation—a feeling of uncertainty that is reflected in the way in which visitors to the installation are given the freedom to move around, without having to concentrate on a center or to follow a pre-set route. Appropriately, then, the book takes the form of a stream of images, in which the spaces and materials of the building (wood, glass, dust, mold, bricks, concrete, plaster …) enter into a dialog with the drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, and photographs made by the artist herself and the other invited artists, including Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Zurab Astakhishvili, Thea Djordjadze, Heike Gallmeier, Rafik Greiss, Dylan Peirce, James Richards, and Maka Sanadze.
For Tolia Astakhishvili, architecture is the space of projection of ideas, which are developed in that space, generating actions that are separate but conducted simultaneously: alteration of structural elements, pictorial and graphic composition, and creation of perceptive ambiguities—of space, light, and sound. The book compiles the traces of this practice, serving as a sort of diachronic diary in the form of images, constituting a complete encapsulation of the artist’s poetics.
The book also features a new interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Photos: Giacomo Bianco